Overview

Europe in early 1945 was a vast physical and moral wasteland. It was now that the weary Allied armies, fighting their way through the devastated Reich, truly came to understand the horror the Nazi's had unleashed. As the Nazi leaders were killed, committed suicide or were captured and the regime fell to pieces, it was through the interrogation of the survivors that the Allies began to find out the true nature of their enemy. In hour after hour of questioning the truth (and of course many lies)about Nazi Europe came spilling out. Richard Overy brings the reader face to face with a regime in its death throes and with a world struggling to understand what had really been perpetrated within the gigantic fortress of Hitler's Reich.

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9780140284546

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Hitler's Nazi regime collapsed at the end of the war in Europe in 1945. He, his police chief Himmler and his propaganda chief Goebbels all killed themselves. Almost all the other Nazi leaders fell into Allied hands; a score of them were put on trial before an international court at Nuremberg, and were cross-questioned first. As Richard Overy remarks, the interrogation of the leading members of a governing class within a few weeks of their loss of power should provide unprecedented insights into their regime. Indeed this was just what happened. All the papers have now been publicly released, and Overy's industry can show us some of the results. Needless to say, though these were on-the-spot testimonies by men in a position to know what they were talking about, they include many mistakes; no one is infallible. Overy, as a leading historian of the mid-20th century, is well placed to correct them, and to choose which examples best show what Nazism was and how it worked. The star prisoner was Goering, weaned off morphine by his captors and so able to dominate most of his interrogators. Three hard-faced Soviet secret policemen arrived to grill him, and left two hours later roaring with laughter. Goering admitted his side had lost the war, but like most of his fellow prisoners was not able to see that he had done anything wrong. As a counterpoint to this, Overy prints a joint interrogation of Hess, the commandant of Auschwitz, and Moll, whose task it was to dispose of the bodies there in an orderly fashion: by hundreds of thousands. This is a ghastly but necessary tale, well told. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Richard Overy is Professor of History at King's College London. His previous books include WHY THE ALLIES WON, RUSSIA'S WAR and THE BATTLE.

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